Something monstrous is taking shape in America, Jacob Siegel says:
Formally, it exhibits the synergy of state and corporate power in service of a tribal zeal that is the hallmark of fascism. Yet anyone who spends time in America and is not a brainwashed zealot can tell that it is not a fascist country. What is coming into being is a new form of government and social organization that is as different from mid-twentieth century liberal democracy as the early American republic was from the British monarchism that it grew out of and eventually supplanted. A state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals, is being replaced by a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms. It resembles the Chinese system of social credit and one-party state control, and yet that, too, misses the distinctively American and providential character of the control system. In the time we lose trying to name it, the thing itself may disappear back into the bureaucratic shadows, covering up any trace of it with automated deletions from the top-secret data centers of Amazon Web Services, “the trusted cloud for government.”
Samuel T. Francis and James Burnham correctly described this state already, the Managerial State, or, as the author of this excerpts correctly identities it, Leviathan.
Leviathan just happens to have new toys.
“A state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals”
Did that ever really exist as more than an aspiration? A worthy aspiration, perhaps, but one more honored in the breach than the observance. Real societies are organized as hierarchies of cliques. As the rule of law collapses, that social reality just becomes more visible.
The Democratic Party has monopolized the bureaucracies since the 1930′s, but defending the Clintons finally broke the pretend nonpartisanship. So, endless corruption, incompetent patronage hires, decisions made by moral panics.